July 1st happens to be my wedding anniversary. Sixteenth if you care. In honor of my anniversary, my wife is going to grill me a nice juicy steak this evening.

Really! Unlike your backwards little worlds, in Chez Calcaterra the woman is the master of the grill. Deduct all the man points from me that you want, but just know that while you chauvinists are sweating over a hot grill and demanding that you be in charge of the meat, I’m sitting in a lounge chair and enjoying a tasty beverage. And, truth be told, a much more tasty steak than I could ever grill myself.

July 1st is also notable, however, in that it is Canada Day. I have too many windows open right now to Google it, but I’m pretty sure that Canada Day marks the anniversary of the time a heavily-armed contingent of Canadian freedom fighters drove the British Army into the Bay of Fundy, after which they executed Queen Victoria on the front steps of The Château Frontenac. It’s a nation borne of violence, really, and it’s evident in everything those godless northern heathens do. I should know. My mother’s parents and her entire extended family is Canadian. They’re a people not to be trifled with.

In honor of Canada Day, the Jays played at home this afternoon, and they did it to a packed house, which was nice to see. They also did it in special uniforms in honour of the holiday:

I can’t say I like ’em that much. But I don’t like my mother’s parents or her entire extended family all that much either, so maybe I’m just not meant to understand.

You know the baseballs are different. We know the baseballs are different. Pitchers have been saying the baseballs are different. And now Major League Baseball has acknowledged that the baseballs are different in a report of findings by a team of scientists from some of the top universities in the world, like Stanford, Caltech, and M.I.T.

Though the study did not discover meaningful changes in the ball’s lift, it found that the drag coefficient of MLB balls has decreased since 2015. The researchers used a physics model to calculate that if the change in home run rate was attributable entirely to changes in drag, one would expect the drag coefficient to have decreased by approximately 0.012. The exact change in drag coefficient in the time period studied — if you’re scoring at home — was 0.0153.

It’s not the seams or the core that has changed — those aspects were tested — and it’s not the weather either. In fact, the commision couldn’t figure out what is causing the decrease in drag, despite numerous tests on all elements of the ball. It might simply come down to manufacturing advancements. Looking at you, Rawlings …

“Rawlings is always trying to improve the manufacturing process to make it more uniform,” Alan Nathan, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign told MLB.com. “So the interesting question that comes up is whether the goal should be to improve the manufacturing process or to keep the ball performing exactly the way it is, regardless of whether it’s improved or not.”